Can simulation technology enable a paradigm shift in process control?: Modeling for the rest of us

Commercial process simulation software makes it easy for experts to develop very complex models with thousands of equations. But how well are these models used? Remember the admonition of Box [Box, G. E. P. (1979). Robustness in scientific model building. In R. L. Launer & G. N. Wilkinson (Eds.), Robustness in statistics (pp. 201–236). New York: Academic Press], “All models are wrong, but some are useful”. Are case runs just captured in a report and then filed away? Is the expert the only one who can run additional cases? We believe that process dynamics simulation should be ubiquitous in chemical engineering practice and education. Undergraduate engineers should experience unit operations through a virtual process simulator. In industry, engineers must be able to quickly build dynamic models to study operability and design control strategies. We feel that DuPont has undergone a paradigm shift where engineers are much more likely to use dynamic simulation as part of their day-to-day work. This paper illustrates some of the features that process dynamic simulators need to enable this paradigm shift.